Recently, I was browsing the Internet and I came across a great infographic on Charise Stevens' website. The infographic describes specific differences between inbound and outbound marketing. What inbound marketing is and isn't seems to be a topic of debate in the real estate Industry these days. In my opinion, this graphic clearly details these things and today I thought I would give specific real estate examples that speak to the details of the below graphic.

Interactive Communication vs. One Way Communication

Most forms of traditional media in the real estate industry involve an agent blasting their marketing pieces out, en masse, to get their brand out to the largest number of people possible. The most common forms of this type of marketing would be postcards or magazine ads. This is more or less a one way form of communication (your message in front of homeowners).

Inbound marketing for real estate revolves around a much more collaborative process. With inbound, you generate educational material, which establishes you as a thought leader in your marketplace and then encourage discussion. These discussions may happen through your blog, on your social media sites, or even perhaps through landing pages.

Customers Finding You Vs. You Finding Customers

If you are trying to determine whether a form of marketing you are currently involved in to promote your real estate career, ask yourself this simple question: "Do customers seek me out and find me via things such as search engines, referrals or social media? OR Am I seeking customers out, trying to build my brand into their minds, until they call me?"

In every instance, inbound marketing revolves around customers finding you. Not just customers, but your IDEAL customers. You want to generate content that will attract these folks, turn them into qualified leads and convert them into clients.

To Add Value or Not to Add Value?

At first glance, this one might sound bad. While in a short sentence, inbound marketing can be described as providing value and outbound marketing can be described as often providing little or no added value. This is somewhat misleading, due to its brevity.

The reason Iibound marketing offers so much value is because you are tailoring your content specifically to things you know your ideal customers will be interested in learning about. These people find you on search engines. Because they seek you out, they are willing to put "more skin in the game." This means you can provide lots of detailed, value-added or educational content and the website visitor would be willing to spend the time to absorb it all.

Outbound marketing is not bad. It's just content that falls on a much broader cross section of people. These are also people that are not expecting your message. Therefore, you have about three seconds to grab their attention, and most likely 30-60 seconds to get your point across. So while there are ways you can provide value through outbound marketing, it's much harder to provide value-added or educational material to people in this engine, given these time constraints.

Educating and Entertaining vs. Not

Again, speaking to my point above, given the two vehicles and how they are absorbed by people, if you want to establish yourself as the thought leader in your market place and truly want to educate, entertain and delight prospective clients until they become actual clients, the only easy way to do this is through inbound marketing.

So which is actually better? Inbound or outbound? The truth is there is no single way to market your real estate practice that is going to be the "magic bullet" that takes care of everything. The most successful real estate practices are built on the concept of doing many types of marketing, all in sync, all in moderation.

Hopefully my description of inbound versus outbound will help you decide the best vehicle for your next marketing initiative, ensuring you get the results you so richly deserve.

To view the original article, visit the Leading Agent blog.